Are Birds Descended From Dinosaurs?

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Flight in birds at least did not come from biing up trees, they think it came from dinosaurs. Birds are descended from feathered dinosaurs, lots of dinosaurs. We now know had feathers, probably for therma regulation purposes originally. So they develop feathers for thermo regulation purposes, and then the feathers proved useful for a flight surface after that. There's no primate tha developed that that gliding trick. The there are gibbons that leap alone panominal distances and swing themselves from their arms,. but they haven't developed the extra membrane.

Evolution has equipped species with a variety of ways to travel through the air — flapping, gliding, floating, not to mention jumping really high. But it hasn’t invented jet engines. What are the different ways that heavier-than-air objects might be made to fly, and why does natural selection produce some of them but not others? Richard Dawkins has a new book on the subject, Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution. We take the opportunity to talk about other central issues in evolution: levels of selection, the extended phenotype, the role of adaptation, and how genes relate to organisms.

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Richard Dawkins received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Oxford. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, where he was previously the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. He is an internationally best-selling author, whose books include The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature.

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